Similarity, not difference, breeds conflict.
When we came to Australia in the 1980s my parents remarked upon how cheap certain cuts of meat were at the butchers'. 'White' Aussies didn't eat the fatty belly pork prized by south-east Asians, so we gorged on it at bargain prices.
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They also didn't eat squid, to the delight of Greek and Italian immigrants who scooped up prime calamari at the cost of bait.
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Likewise, we had little taste for the pungency of lamb or the dry 'lean' beef steaks which were raved about in Women's Day magazines.
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Our dollars were not competing with theirs. Our desires were not rivals.
Common wisdom has it that peace is to be found in homogeneity, either in cultures which have kept themselves pure or somehow banded together towards a common goal. Difference, through misunderstanding, is believed to drive us apart.
But brutality lurks in homogeneous societies too. The high suicide rates in far east Asia and the domestic violence in eastern Europe clashes with their - oft-fetishised - facades of ethno-cultural harmony. This is not a modern phenomenon. Having the same physicality and language didn't stop Aztecs from carving out hearts, or Roundheads from killing Cavaliers.
French philosopher René Girard has a simple explanation for why conflict may lie in sameness: our desires are mimetic, or learned. You learn what to want from your family and friends. (You learn to want your opposite-sex parent from your same-sex parent, and ... yeah nah, let's keep it PG-13 from here.)
In a closed society, everyone eventually wants the same thing.
There's logic behind this. If someone is onto a good thing and that someone is kind of like you, then it makes sense to think that thing might also be good for you.
It could be a product, an investment, a mindset, a process. It just has to be seen as 'good' in and of itself.
Over time, everyone piles into that sure bet, bidding up the price, and discounting the risk that it's no longer worth what people are paying for it. Are you getting Minsky cycle vibes? I'm getting Minksy vibes.
It's not just financial assets. Consider other life goals that have an overwhelmingly positive moral halo: get a good education, get a good job, start a nice family, get a nice home. Expenses aligning with these goals - education, housing, childcare - have outpaced inflation. Paths to success become crowded. Societies responding by widening those paths into highways reinforce those choices, crowding them even more.
People aren't sheep. They know there's too much competition for diminishing returns. Young parents are especially conscious of ever-increasing expectations. Yet, few willingly peace out and choose a different direction. There must be other reasons keeping them in the game.
Declining rewards from buying in are replaced with punishment for missing out.
Girard asserts that the whole angst-y affair is perpetuated with scapegoating, both as an outlet and as team-building.
A college education in the US means crippling debt, but failing to get one means being locked out of even entry level jobs.
Japanese kids who do not meet the strict conformity of recruitment shukatsu get left behind forever, a disproportionately harsh sentence for failing at chanting company songs and wearing black uniforms, which has no relevance elsewhere in life.
Aussie kids who can't get on the property ladder have their love of avocado toast blamed for the dreaded fate of becoming life-long renters. More public housing, it seems, would deprive them of learning from their moral failure.
Or peacocks. (Stay with me here. I'm trying to illustrate the universality of the concept.)
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Those tail feathers are pretty cumbersome, and there's no reason a female should avoid blokes with more modest packages (yuk, yuk) but evolution has created a market where it's either grow big ones or resort to that Cassowary dating app. (Nothing wrong with Cassowaries. I have Cassowary friends.)
If a game's reward stays the same and the entry fee keeps rising, then the only way to keep people playing is to increase the penalty for quitting.
As this fascinating podcast on how Girard's theories apply to politics proposes, there is something pharmacological about scapegoating. Societies don't just wake up and say, "Hey guys, we just did a blood sacrifice, maybe we need to tone things down a bit." It's more like antibiotic resistance: the more you use, the more you can push conditions, and the more you'll need.
So, uh, about that conflict you promised...
You mean the self-assured ruthlessness exerted upon more and more of your own kind? I already described it.
Or maybe you were expecting protests and organised resistance. Violence comes in more than one form. Eid Al-adha sacrifices are a family affair where goats are slaughtered in the backyard, not on the battlefield.
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Of course, conflict does arise in conditions of diversity. Though notably in pushes for utopia by excising undesirables, that is, transitions to homogeneity. Think cultural revolutions, eugenics, or genocides.
Everybody wants ...
The xenophobe who paradoxically fears people with different values to them but the same desires should probably be comforted by the former and alarmed by the latter.
Nationalistic talk of restricting immigration to people with similar backgrounds may not lead to the harmony promised. We try to foster empathy with the sentiment that entrants 'want the same things we do', where we could instead be pointing out that we can easily accommodate them because they actually don't.
Girard's solution to our scapegoating instinct lay in
Christian forgiveness; tolerating birds of a different feather. I
think we must welcome them for more selfish reasons.
Living with someone who has learned to 'want the same' is inherently competitive. Living with someone who has learned to want something different is complementary, leading to efficient use of surrounding resources, best illustrated by ... a nursery rhyme:
"Jack will eat not fat, and Jull doth love no leane.
Yet betwixt them both they lick the dishes cleane."
Multiculturalism's incoherence is a feature, not a bug. These 'other' can make us wise to other aspirations, particularly if
we're hesitant about sinking more resources into congested conventional pathways. At the very least, they prove
that the world won't fall apart if you don't desire the same as everyone else.
People should be exposed to if not encouraged to find and pursue different paths to success - whether or not they involve houses, jobs, or families - because difference is non-competitive. There is no tragedy of the commons without a commons. The least troublesome neighbour is one you never see because they work a different shift.
By now, however, many a white Australian has learned the joys of crackling roast pork and salt-and-pepper squid, as I have the tang of a medium-rare filet.
It may once again be time to import different desires.
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